The Astute Reader still can't deign to post a comment here, and thus I feel safe in presuming that either they don't exist -- as SiteMeter would have me believe -- or perhaps they are sufficiently astute as to not reveal their reading to all and sundry, including SiteMeter. Thus, in the absence of any kind of feedback, I must presume there's no readership, and this is less for the attentions of the Astute Reader, and more for the memory of Dear Diary.
First, a technical note.
Those who remember that since 2001 or so I have involved myself deeply in trying to increase security, reduce crime, and stop violence.
Part of increasing security involved mounting webcams to the world-wide web. You can see what they saw within the last minute, during daylight hours. One of the cameras sees best in low-light conditions, so the image is a bit washed-out during the bright sunshine.
Part of this also involves archiving the images taken, and thanks to immense storage media, I've been known to pile up images for a year or more at a time. However, since there's four images taken per minute, it has been a little difficult for people to search through the image repository.
So now, for the crime researcher's pleasure and ease of doing their work -- not to mention reducing server load, it's a big hit on performance when the server has to list 100,000 files in between each selection and then hit the 'back' button -- the new archive now generates per-day archiving in per-day/per-camera subdirectories, and each hour automatically gets its own index generated, on a per-camera individual basis.
See the archive. Be advised that only days previous to the current day have been indexed, don't want too much Real Time Spying going on.
Also be advised that it took less than 24 hours after activation of the bus-stop security-cam before all of the foreigners riding the bus were aware that the cam was working, and now they all wait at the stop for the bus going the other way, and then cross and board when their actual intended bus approaches. Also, they tend to board or debark now at bus-stops out of camera range.
Talk about furtive! But hell, I really don't like them standing around at the bus-stop in my front yard, anyways.
And now, moving right along:
Some time ago I was donated a couch which is rather more comfortable, despite its age, than the couch which had been sitting in the basement since roughly 1967.
The old couch was a sort of pre-Ikea masterpiece of Nordic furniture crafting, a bit art-deco or somesuch, all elegant swooping lines, naugahide upholstery, and snap-together-and-glue construction. It was also the most heinous pain machine ever devised for anyone with a bad back, and furthermore the naugahide tended to stick to all exposed skin. I think I may have sat in it perhaps a few dozen times in my life. While it looked like a fine piece of art -- and I have tended to keep it polished as such -- in terms of utility, it was trash.
Well, it's not just Yours Truly who thinks so.
For some years after I returned here in late 1995, having been out-and-about in the nation at large, I used to suffer from, well, call them nightmares or dreams or whatever, but by whatever name, it was an unpleasant experience.
It's not too different from what is reported by the folks who claim to have been abducted by space creatures, with the exception that I make no claims to space creatures, or Anal Probes.
No, for me, the experience was that I would hear voices making remarks.
Imagine that you've left a camera in your house and burglars come, and you catch all of the dialogue. For most people, they'd be aghast when the tape was played, especially when the burglars discover the stash of cash or jewelry and declare "jackpot" to each other.
That's bad enough.
But can you imagine if the tape caught burglars who weren't interested in your cash or jewelry, but simply wandered around your house, remarking on your kitschy taste in furniture, your abominable interior decoration, your execrable taste in wall-hung portraiture, and declared your carpet to have been evidently bought at a fire-sale for twelve cents a square foot. Then they examine your footwear and declare that "this was so last year, a decade ago, and five years before they bought it". They then move on to your ties and declare you not merely a fashion menace, but a clear and present danger to the status of public mental health should you dare to appear in public wearing that, people would think they were hallucinating and throw themselves under buses. Then they hold the offending items all together as if modeling an outfit, and one takes pictures, everyone laughs, they put everything back where it was, and depart, leaving not even footprints and taking with them only photographs and a good laugh.
People have actually done this, more often than you might think. However, this example is both historical and Infamous:
Charles Manson Creepy Crawl @ Yahoo! Video
Recognize it? It's the Charles Manson Family.
The Mansonites used to do this quite frequently.
From the Testimony of Linda Kasabian in the Tate/LaBianca murder trial:
A: I thought we were going on a creepy-crawl mission.
Q: A creepy-crawling mission?
A: Yes.
Q: What is a creepy-crawling mission?
A: A creepy-crawling mission is where you creepy-crawl into people's houses and you take things which actually belong to you in the beginning, because it actually belongs to everybody. I remember one specific instance where the girls made Charlie a long, black cape, and one of the girls was fitting it to him, and he sort of said, "Now when I go creepy-crawling, people won't see me because they will think I am a bush or a tree."
Of course, this testimony regards the night of the actual horrific murder of Sharon Tate, et al.
All of that other creepy-crawling was just practice.
A few nights ago, sleeping a very light sleep as I have managed to cut down my beer consumption from an average of about 12 a night to about 6 a night -- trust me, for me that's an improvement -- I froze the instant of wakening and listened. I couldn't make out the second voice, though I think it said "that's enough, let's go". What I made out pretty clear, though, was what I recall as "well, we can always get him for Hoarding".
Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome (or "Hoarding") is a pathological psychological disorder in which people, well, collect crap.
Useless things pile up, saved by the afflicted person according to some internal valuation that is quite skewed from "normal", whatever "normal" might be thought to be.
Here's a checklist, from the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation website (cited with link immediately above):
[ ... ]
To differentiate "normal" collecting from compulsive hoarding, Dr. Randy Frost and his colleagues define the compulsive hoarding syndrome according to three criteria:
1. The acquisition of, and failure to discard, possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value. Compulsive hoarders have an obsessive need to acquire and save many objects, and tremendous anxiety about discarding them, because of a perceived need for the objects for their apparent value. Sometimes an excessive emotional attachment to them develops. A compulsive hoarder will think, "This is too good to throw away," "This is important information," "I will need this later on," "This should not be wasted." These thoughts are generally normal, but their frequency and the importance attached to them are clearly excessive in compulsive hoarders. If they have any doubt at all as to the value of an object -- no matter how trivial, compulsive hoarders will keep it -- just in case.
2. Living spaces sufficiently cluttered so as to preclude activities for which those spaces were originally designed. Obviously, with many items coming into the home and very few going out, the clutter will accumulate. It does not take long for the clutter to spread onto the floors, counter tops, hallways, stairwells, garage, and cars. Beds become so cluttered that there is no room to sleep. Chairs become buried under clutter, so there is nowhere to sit. Kitchen counters become so cluttered that food cannot be prepared. For many hoarders, it gets to a point where there might be only a narrow pathway that connects each room, and the rest of the house is piled several feet high with clutter. It becomes impossible to use many areas of the house for their original purpose.
3. Significant distress or impairment in functioning is caused by the hoarding. Because of their desire for perfection, compulsive hoarders frequently take a long time to do even small chores. An inordinate amount of time may be spent "churning" -- moving items from one pile to another but never actually discarding any item nor establishing any consistent organizational system. Many compulsive hoarders have limited social interactions. The nature of their problem makes them socially isolated. They are frequently too embarrassed by their clutter to have people come to their home, sometimes for many years. Some compulsive hoarders are able to work, but they will often comment that they are not working in a job that fully utilizes their skills or potential. They always come in early and leave late because they take much longer than other people to finish tasks. A survey of elderly hoarders found that hoarding constituted a physical health threat in 81% of identified cases. These included threat of fire hazard, falling, unsanitary conditions, and inability to prepare food.
[ ... ] ("Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome - An Introduction", Maidment, Karron RN M.A., Obsessive Compulsion Foundation website, downloaded 2009 September 28.)
As for me, I figure that now that I have passed on to another that decorative but useless couch, I can now use the much nicer couch that I have. I don't know, though, do all of the little throw pillows on the couch count as "clutter"? Well, they don't perfectly match the upholstry, so some folks might say "of course it's clutter. How declasse, non-matching throw pillows. Lock him up for electroshock!"
And now, with the old couch gone and the new one moved into position, I have a place for that really nice old rosewood antique coffee table, so it's not going to be collecting clutter. Etc etc etc.
Look, I know from clutter, and I've had to clean out the detrietus from people who were pathologic hoarders. After the last one, I decided that I should always be on guard against "being possessed by the Crapification demon".
About three or four times a year, I give my living space a good going-over and generally take a truckload of crap to the dump.
I have a bookshelf that is chock full of science fiction paperbacks. They are even in alphabetic order, sorted by last name of author as is standard practice. Sadly, I need to go buy another bookcase to take up the rougly 50 book overflow. I could also get another filing cabinet to orderly file the five years of bank records that Federal law requires me to keep on-premises, rather than just stacking them in "office stacker" racks.
Still, all in all, since I dump the trash and recycle the recyclables once a week, though I may not order my life and living space as is de-rigeur for Gays and Obsessives Interior Decorating Magazine subscribers, I don't think it rises to the level of "hoarding". Though I imagine that some people might be fooled by the ever growing pile of stuff that is scheduled for a trip to the dump, when it gets big enough or when I am headed to the dump already, whichever comes first. It's piled perfectly out of the way, right next to the door, because it's less distance to carry.
Of course, all of these protestations do not for a moment resolve the other glaring issue.
The other glaring issue, of course, is whether or not I might be suffering from Sleep Paralysis, an episode of Lucid Dreaming, something in between the two.
Then again, given the provisions of the USA Patriot Act and the fuzziness of Constitutional protections when warrantless search-and-seizure including wiretaps, computer hacking, black-bag jobs, and stalking are allowed -- not to mention the shameful case of the Maryland State Police infiltrating anti-death-penalty activism groups as well as others -- I need to figure out, if I am really hearing unauthorized voices in my house waking me from sleep, who exactly is responsible:
Out of control police, or social agency workers or allies operating far outside of reasonable bounds? What is this, fucking El Salvador? (looks around neighborhood, shudders...)
Or is it a modern Manson Family?
One thing's for sure: now that the ugly useless couch is gone, they're not going to "get him for Hoarding".
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